Agents

Last night I was a panelist on a zoom presentation sponsored by the Author’s Guild, moderated by Jane Friedman. The other panelists included an editor from Little, Brown, a literary agent, a publisher for a major independent press, and the director of a CMLP, a nonprofit for smaller presses. (You can find their names—I’m not trying to hide, just generalize!—here).

When Jane asked us all about agents, the others all said getting an agent was the most preferable way to publish. Neither Grove, Atlantic nor Little, Brown consider unagented submissions. Mary Gannon of CMLP thought it best to try to get an agent first and then, if that fails, try publishers that accept unagented submissions. I was the outlier. “We pretty much never work with agents!” was my contribution, and then I tried not to feel like the loser in the group, publishing only the unwashed books already rejected by scores of others.

But I really believe our main strength as a press comes from the way we acquire books, and …